Monday, March 26, 2018

For the unfamiliar, a "reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the placement of key, revelatory information in a story. Most times, the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.

FADE IN:

EXTERIOR
- CASTLE WALLS - DAY

Mist.
Several seconds of it swirling about. Silence possibly, atmospheric music.
SUPERIMPOSE "England AD 787". After a few more seconds we hear
hoofbeats in the distance. They come slowly closer. Then out of the mist comes
KING ARTHUR followed by a SERVANT who is banging two half coconuts

together.
ARTHUR raises his hand.

ARTHUR

Whoa there!

SERVANT
makes noises of horses halting, with a flourish. ARTHUR peers through the mist.
CUT TO shot from over his shoulder: castle (e.g. Bodium) rising out of the
mist. On the castle battlements a SOLDIER is dimly seen. He peers down.

SOLDIER

Halt! Who goes there?

ARTHUR

It is I, Arthur, son of Uther

Pendragon, from the castle of

Camelot.
King of all Britons,

defeator of the Saxons, sove-

reign of all England!

Pause.

SOLDIER

Get away!

ARTHUR

I am...
And this my trusty

servant, Patsy. We have ridden

the length and breadth of the

land in search of knights who

will join our court at Camelot..

I must speak with your lord

and master.

SOLDIER

What?
Ridden on a horse?

ARTHUR

Yes!

SOLDIER

You're using coconuts!

ARTHUR

...What?

SOLDIER

You've got two empty halves

of coconuts and you're bang-

ing them together.

ARTHUR

(Scornfully)

So? We have ridden since the

snows of winter covered this

land, through the kingdom of

Mercea.

SOLDIER

Where did you get the coco-

nuts?

ARTHUR

Through ... We found them.

SOLDIER

Found them? In Mercea. The co-

conut's tropical!

ARTHUR

What do you mean?

SOLDIE

Well, this is a temperate zone.

ARTHUR

The swallow may fly south

with the sun, or the house

martin or the plover seek

warmer hot lands in winter,

yet these are not strangers

to our land.

SOLDIER

Are you suggesting coconuts

migrate?

ARTHUR

Not at all. They could be

carried.

SOLDIER

What? A swallow carrying a

coconut?

ARTHUR

Why not?

SOLDIER

I'll tell you why not ...

because a swallow is about

eight inches long and weighs

five ounces, and you'd be

lucky to find a coconut un-

der a pound.

ARTHUR

It could grip it by the husk...

SOLDIER

It's not a question of where

he grips it. It's a simple

matter of weight - ratios ...

A five-ounce bird could not

hold a a one pound coconut.

ARTHUR

Well, it doesn't matter. Go

and tell your master that

Arthur from the Court of

Camelot is here.

A
Slight pause. Swirling mist. Silence.

SOLDIER

Look! To maintain Velocity,

a swallow needs to beat its

wings four hundred and ninety

three times every second.

Right?

ARTHUR

(irritated)

Please!

SOLDIER

Am I right?

ARTHUR

I'm not interested.

SECOND SOLDIER

(who has loomed up

on the battlements)

It could be carried by an Afri-

can swallow!

FIRST SOLDIER

Oh yes! An African swallow may-

be ... but not a European swal-

low. that's my point.

SECOND SOLDIER

Oh yes, I agree there ...

ARTHUR

(losing patience)

Will you ask your master if he

wants to join the Knights of

Camelot?!

FIRST SOLDIER

But then of course African swal-

lows are non-migratory.

SECOND SOLDIER

Oh yes.

ARTHUR
raises his eyes heavenwards and nods to PATSY. They turn

and
go off into the mist.

FIRST SOLDIER

So they wouldn't be able to

bring a coconut back anyway.

SECOND SOLDIER

Wait a minute! Suppose two swal-

lows carried it together?

FIRST SOLDIER

No, they'd have to have it on a line.

Stillness. Silence again.

ANIMATION/LIVE
ACTION SEQUENCE - DEATH AND DEVASTATION

CUT
TO Terry Gilliam's sequence of Brueghel prints. Sounds of

strange
medieval music. Discordant and sparse. Wailings and groanings. The last picture
mixes through into live action. BIG CLOSE UP of con- torted face upside down. A
leg falls across

it.
Creaking noise. The bodies lurch away from CAMERA to reveal they are amongst a
huge pile of bodies on a swaying cart that is lumbering away from CAMERA. It is
pulled by a couple of

ragged,
dirty emaciated WRETCHES. Behind the cart walks another MAN who looks slightly
more prosperous, but only on the scale of complete and utter impoverishment. He
wears a black hood and looks sinister.

CART DRIVER

Bring out your dead!

We
follow the cart through a wretched, impov- erished plague-ridden village. A few
starved mongrels run about in the mud scavenging. In

the
open doorway of one house perhaps we just glimpse a pair of legs dangling from
the ceiling. In another doorway an OLD
WOMAN is beating a cat against a wall rather like one does with a mat. The
cart passes round a dead donkey or cow in the mud. And a MAN tied to a cart
is being hammered to death by four NUNS with huge mallets.

CART DRIVER

Bring out your dead!

There
are legs stick out of windows and doors. Two MEN are fighting in the mud -
covered from head to foot in it. Another MAN is on his

hands
in knees shovelling mud into his mouth. We just catch sight of a MAN falling
into a well.

Monty Python’s Michael Palin describes an episode that happened during
the shooting of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL:I remember the
end of one day when we’d been doing a lot of crouching with the castle in the
background and Terry Gilliam asked us to crouch once more because there was a
lovely shaft of sunlight coming and catching John’s [Cleese] helmet. John went
absolutely berserk, saying, “You know I’m not waiting for a shaft of light to
strike my fucking helmet. We’ve been here for four hours, we’ve crouched and
it’s cold. What are you waiting for? The moon and the stars to arrange
themselves around my head?”I got very
angry myself. I had to be the “mud-eater” for eight takes. The mud-eater was
this character who had to crawl across the mud as John and Graham [Chapman]
were coming through the village at the beginning and I had to go up and eat
this mud. It was really a shot for those two, but I dutifully did my bit,
crawled through this filthy, stinking, pig-shitty mud and they said they wanted
to do take eight. John went, “Why? What the hell was going on?” To which someone
said, “Well, you were fine, but we can see Mike’s back.” That’s when I just
went, “What? You can see my back, what have you been doing all this time?” And
I went absolutely ape and threw myself in the air, landed in the mud and just
wiggled my legs around, screamed and yelled for about five seconds. There was
absolute silence and then John and Graham just led this spontaneous applause.
John said he’d never seen anything like it, he’d never seen me get angry ever.
Then they had to do the scene where I actually eat the mud and the props boy
said, “When you get to the mud, don’t worry, because I’m going to put some
chocolate down there that looks just like mud, so it’s completely edible.” I
said, “How will I know which is the chocolate and which is the mud?” They had
no answer to that. So I had to eat whatever was there, most of it was chocolate
but a little bit of it was mud. After that we had to go and get anti-tetanus
injections in this little tiny Scottish doctor’s surgery and he was completely
amazed to see this creature in just a bundle of rags and a rather bad wig
coming to have this injection because I’d been eating mud. He had to have
several quick Scotches before he could administer, I think.Back to the
hotel for rushes [the day’s film to be screened]. The day of the mud-eater.
Clad in rags, crawling through filthy mud, repeatedly and doggedly in a scene
which makes the flagellation scene from SEVENTH SEAL look positively
comfortable. Extras all supposed to have plague with boils and pustules everywhere.
That night at dinner the menu began, “…with various effluents.” I asked Mr.
Ross rather gruffly what this meant, then saw the rest of the menu: “Mud
Cocktail”, “Filet of sole a la slime”, etc. A complete mud menu.---THE PYTHONS,
Autobiography by THE PYTHONS with Bob McCabe, Orion Books, Ltd. 2003.

John Cleese - “We never made any real money until THE HOLY GRAIL came
out in America. We’d started in ’69, we’d been together six years and then all
of a sudden there was money coming in on a different scale from anything
before.” The BBC sold the 4th season of the television series to the
ABC television network. However, the Pythons preferred America’s PBS which had
previously telecast the show because it had no commercials and the shows went
out as intended, a whole continuous thing.

Someone sent them a tape of the ABC version and they were appalled. Six
shows had been cannibalized into two 45-minute “Specials” and “they’d obviously
gone through looking for anything that might conceivably be seen as offensive
and taken it out. And in so doing, they just removed all the funny bits.”---Terry
Jones. Python’s métier was mockery. It was inherently offensive. That was the
point. To hold up society’s insanity and hypocrisy to the audience, satire at
it’s most lethal.

Of course, the Pythons sued. Because Terry Gilliam was American, they
got it into the New York Courts. They showed the original version, and then the
ABC version. Everybody laughed at the first. Nobody laughed at the second. “The
idea of suing people to stop yourselves going on TV is so pure… because people
are so desperate to be on television in America.”---Eric Idle. So pure… and so
Python.

Despite it all, including the Judge being a fan and asking for
autographs for his kids, they lost “…cancelling [ABC’s version] at this time
would cause undue financial harm to ABC. And to Terry [Gilliam] and me who were
sharing one room the whole idea of causing undue financial harm to a
multi-million dollar corporation seemed fairly ripe.”—Michael Palin

#

FADE OUT:

Quote of the Post:

And I went
absolutely ape and threw myself in the air, landed in the mud and just wiggled
my legs around, screamed and yelled for about five seconds. There was absolute
silence and then John and Graham just led this spontaneous applause.

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About Me

I am a writer with four published novels, others on the way, a nonfiction book, several screenplays written and in development. During and after college, I worked as a theater projectionist and manager, in public relations, and as a literary agent selling to publishers and producers. Two heads are better than one, so I keep a human skull on my desk for inspiration (and a second opinion--FWIW, he's dead-on). I currently work as a computer network administrator in government. I'm married and the father of two daughters.
“I’m a computer professional: I don’t lie, I manage information.”
Get in touch: LateralTao ( followed by the encircled "a" symbol, followed by the 5-letter name for the Google mail client, and then the period symbol followed by the usual 3-letter start to "communication") Now THAT oughta confuse the spambots out there.